Chest pains are often connected to heart strokes. When people have pain in the chest they automatically fear that something is wrong with their heart. People are terrified by the idea of having a heart stroke because they are so dangerous and they do kill millions of people every year worldwide. When a person has an anxiety attack one of the main symptoms other than a racing heart beat is chest pain and suffocation. These symptoms along with extreme dizziness, fatigue, headaches, vomiting often leads the patient to call the ambulance and rush immediately to the hospital. In most of the cases, once the patient arrives in the E. R. room he/she is being told that they are having a panic attack and nothing is wrong with their heart.
Take a minute to think what happens to your body when you’re having a panic attack; it is in fear response mode. This basically means that you breathe harder to pump more blood in your body. If you were being attacked by someone you would need to act quickly to defend yourself, that’s why we have a built in fight-or-flight response that our body activates once we feel any type of danger or threat. When you have a panic attack you have the same response, but without any obvious danger. It’s not necessary to suffer from anxiety in order to have panic attacks but in most of the cases patients report panic attacks as an ongoing process that never ends even for months after their first panic attacks. It is then, when we can talk about chronic anxiety or panic disorder.
Why do you need more blood pumped in your body and chemicals released into your blood stream when you feel in danger? The answer is that you actually don’t need extra adrenaline released in your body and this is exactly what causes you all the panic attack symptoms that we have mentioned above. You will start breathing very deeply without needing to do so and this will cause you to accumulate extra air in your chest and diaphragm area that you don’t need. (that is the reason you feel suffocated while you’re having a panic attack) Eventually this will cause pain because your chest is expanding beyond it’s limits and pushing on your rib cage.
The second cause of chest pain is caused by the acid reflux. When you become stressed your body sends less blood to your digestive system and instead the blood goes to other parts of the body. During the fight or flight response especially, the body completely shuts off the digestive system because we don’t need it at that moment. The longer the food stays in your stomach the acid will back up in your esophagus. This can causes chest pain and a very painful throat.
